Instagram hashtags are a powerful tool. They can skyrocket your business to new heights by helping you reach a more targeted audience, increase engagement, and develop a more recognizable brand image.
Hashtags can make or break your Instagram marketing strategy. 81% of marketers say using them has been somewhat or very effective. But if used too frequently or without a clear strategy in mind, they become pointless and inefficient.
It can be difficult to choose the right hashtags on Instagram, but that doesn’t mean you have to guess. If you want to gain more from Instagram hashtags, you have to be willing to use data.
To use hashtags for Instagram effectively, you need to understand exactly how they work, and put some thought into a strategy. Using Instagram hashtag analytics is the best way to get there—especially if you’re using the right tools.
Tracking hashtags is an essential part of social marketing, whether you’re a seasoned expert or just getting started with it. It’s the key to knowing how to measure Instagram hashtag performance and find the best hashtags for your brand.
Let’s dive into how to see which hashtags are working on Instagram by using all the tools at your disposal.
Instagram hashtags are still one of the most effective ways to get more eyes (and engagement) on your Instagram posts in 2022. As a better way to categorize your posts, hashtags help you reach a target audience, and more importantly, they help your target audience find you.
Since the very first hashtag was used on Twitter in 2007, they’ve become commonplace within social media, with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn having implemented the searchable feature as well.
In spite of recent debate and Instagram’s slow but steady pivot towards more semantic keyword search, hashtags are still an integral part of the Instagram culture.
Hashtags work well on Instagram and play a key role in creating engagements. Users are more likely to engage with your post because it is exactly what they were looking for. Paired with a strong content strategy, they can help yield impressive results.
Using hashtags as part of your Instagram strategy creates the perfect method for finding relevant content and the right influencers to collaborate with, giving your audience an easy way to find your content, and grouping together like conversations.
Since hashtags are so common, they can be used in many different ways and on many different platforms—though Instagram remains king in that area.
These strategies can range from using your own branded hashtag to encourage your audience to share User-Generated Content or jumping on trending hashtags to create popular content that reaches a larger audience.
Here’s Coca Cola using their “#RefreshTheFeed” hashtag to keep things interesting on their Instagram account:
Here are a few benefits of using hashtags on Instagram the right way:
Sadly, there’s no secret recipe to guarantee the success of your Instagram hashtag strategy. However, you can define the right concentration and type of hashtags for your Instagram strategy by testing and analyzing available data.
If you’ve made the switch to an Instagram business profile, you have access to Post Insights that tell you how many impressions you received from hashtags. This data helps you figure out which hashtags are most effective for improving reach.
Using Instagram analytics helps you understand audience preferences by analyzing metrics like:
Analyzing the performance of your hashtags is the best way to monitor their success, and will allow you to fine-tune your strategy over time.
However, simply relying on the basic Instagram Insights may not be giving you the data you need to take your Instagram strategy to the next level.
When it comes to hashtag effectiveness, Instagram just doesn’t provide enough data. Sure, tracking metrics like reach and impressions from the native app gives you aggregate data on hashtags. But that won’t give you an in-depth view of what happens with your hashtags campaigns.
Although Instagram gives a general overview of post performance, it doesn’t specifically track the performance of hashtags. By using a dedicated advanced analytics tool, you’ll get a breakdown of postings, other mentioned hashtags, post types, and how many likes or comments they’re driving.
Using the native app insights, you can only track your own hashtags. If you want to get full insight on all hashtags, including those of your competitors, you have to use an analytics tool.
Using Instagram alone doesn’t tell you which hashtags are trending or popular at the moment. A dedicated tool will track hashtag usage, identify top trending hashtags within your industry, and help you post more relevant content your audience will interact with.
In-depth hashtag analytics and tracking can boost your social media efforts. Once you know how to use hashtags strategically, you can bring your social media game to the next level using Flaminjoy.
Choosing the right tool to analyze Instagram hashtag performance makes it easier to achieve your goals.
Flaminjoy offers robust reporting for Instagram and can help you build an effective Instagram hashtag strategy with in-depth analytics.
Here are more reasons why it’s worth paying attention to an advanced hashtag tracking tool like Flaminjoy:
The simple, one-dashboard solution lets you analyze actionable insights about how carousels, video stories, and their timing influence your social media growth.
With this data at hand, you can then decide on what works best by analyzing feed posts and stories, to determine what’s the best ratio, content types, so you can make an informed decision about how much effort your designers should plan for, as well as post frequency, to see if videos posted once per week may bring more results than photo carousels posted daily.
Flaminjoy goes beyond basic hashtag tracking by letting you create queries and find pieces of content that feature specific words and/or hashtags within the content piece’s caption.
For example, you can create a query on #awesomecampaign or @awesomeaccount and search for all the content pieces using that hashtag or within that account that feature the word flowers.
This opens up a new world of possibilities in content discoverability by letting the words in captions or the topics in videos become searchable too.
With Flaminjoy, you create strategies and plan your content with the confidence that they perform. Track all the important metrics to stay on top of your competitors:
The best way to build your hashtag strategy? Building from a solid foundation. Once you’ve found the hashtags you want to use, it’s important to start testing them and digging into your analytics. And that includes influencer campaigns.
The campaign monitoring dashboard is integrated with influencer analytics, meaning you can understand the target audience preferences in terms of content and promoted products, and save time for more creative work by having access to all campaign data in one place.
Ever wished you could gain access to the same social media analytics you get for your account, only for your competitors? Now you can, with Flaminjoy’s competitor benchmarking feature.
Avoid your competitors’ mistakes by simply analyzing what they’re doing. Evaluate which content type and format performs best for your competition by analyzing the hashtags you know they use and figure out what works (and what doesn’t) before launching your marketing campaigns.
Now that you’ve got the know-how and the tools, don’t wait another day to start testing and tracking your hashtag use in your social strategy.
Dig deeper into cost, ROI, and hashtags stats with Flaminjoy and determine which influencers are fit for your business. Get in touch with one of the Flaminjoy experts and book a demo.
Next time Influencer Marketing makes a move, you'll be the first to know!
